Seductive Shadows (2 page)

Instead of a blade, I used a paintbrush to mar her iridescent copper and fine gold skin. The tight weave and parallel grain captured even the smallest markings on her torso. I slashed beneath her rib cage, the center of her arms, and her breasts, leaving behind thick white lines. Feeling her shudder after each stroke caused my legs to tingle. My clit throbbed when I pierced her nipple.

Would Professor Freeman agree that she was complete? Would he believe I had fulfilled the project requirements? When I had worked on her during our last class, he’d worn a slight grin as he watched me fill in the outline of her body, and he’d nodded after each stroke. I’d hoped it was a good sign. I was only eight classes into my bachelor’s degree; I couldn’t afford more than three credits a semester, and I had to work full-time just to pay for those. Professor Freeman was the head of the art department at Northeastern University; with his approval and his connections, I could get a job somewhere in the art industry—maybe even a full scholarship. I needed
Kerrianna
to impress him.

That morning before class I’d completed her hand, her fingers cupping her right breast with crimson nails. By the time I’d returned from school, the paint had dried, so I added the final line: a jagged stripe over her heart. We both had scars. Mine were from an ugly childhood full of abuse and an unexpected accident, but I could make hers beautiful, at least.

I stepped away from the painting, moving to the other side of my bed to make a final examination of
Kerrianna
and her message. The single window in my bedroom didn’t allow much natural light, and the overhead fixture was dim. It was still obvious to me that her story was done. But she wasn’t due for another two days, and turning her in early wouldn’t get me Professor Freeman’s feedback any quicker. I knew his policy about final projects. He wouldn’t reveal anyone’s grade until the whole class had submitted their work.

As I stared at her markings, I felt a prickle on the back of my pinky. I sat on the bed, pulling my knees against my chest and wrapping my arms around them as I continued staring. It didn’t matter what angle I viewed her at; her scars were as visible as my own. It also didn’t matter how hard I scratched my pinky. The pain couldn’t be alleviated. It spread down my wrist, followed by a predictable heat. Those memories couldn’t be extinguished; they couldn’t be shoved in the back of my mind. They wouldn’t move.

I knew it was all in my head, but Emma’s voice filled my ears. My tongue could taste the coffee we’d drunk. She squeezed my fingers while the tattoo gun punctured my skin. She was warm, so warm…

***

When Emma laughed, her head leaned backward; her hair cascaded down to the top of her butt, and her mouth opened wide, like she was taking a bite of a hotdog. Her profile showed the bigger of her two dimples. I couldn’t believe she was laughing and keeping still at the same time. There was nothing humorous about getting her finger stabbed with a tattoo gun, and it definitely didn’t tickle. She’d had to hold my hand when it was my turn.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“I just pictured Dad’s face…when he sees my tat.” A giggle burst through her lips. “Funny, isn’t it?”

“He’s going to kill you,” I said.

“No; he’s going to kill
us
. You’re forgetting that you’re his daughter, too.”

I took a gulp of air and held it in, letting her words course through me. They heated my stomach like her mom’s chicken noodle soup. 

I’d known the Hunt family since middle school. After our first gym class, I gave Emma my phone number on a tiny piece of notebook paper. We’d been best friends ever since. They treated me like family, not just some girl who slept over on the weekends; they praised me when they looked over my report card, reprimanded me when we were late for curfew, celebrated my birthday with cake and presents. They filled me in ways that Lilly—my own mother—didn’t. I didn’t call her Mom. Not anymore. And because Lilly didn’t know who my father was, Mr. Hunt took his place.

“He’ll never see our tattoos, Em,” I told her, “unless he flips our hands over…and why would he ever do that?”

“Dad finds out everything. You know that. And when he finds this out, we’ll be grounded until we leave for ASU.”

“But he has a tattoo, and so does your brother…so why would he ground us? That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Dad doesn’t play fair, you know that.”

“But we’re both eighteen.”

“Yes, we are…but we’ll always be little girls in Dad’s eyes.”

During the first birthday dinner that Mrs. Hunt threw for me, Mr. Hunt told the story of the first time I’d ever come to their house. It had become tradition for him to retell that story every year since. He would say I was a dashing young girl, with brown eyes that smiled, and with style and charm that could sell any car on the lot of his five dealerships. His recollection was different from mine. Emma’s house was bigger than a department store, and I remember wanting to take it all in. Lilly thought it was proper etiquette to wear a dress when visiting the wealthy. Because I didn’t own one, she belted one of her sequined tank tops and hemmed the bottom with a safety pin.

There was so much more to Emma than the kids I played with on my street. She was sophisticated and confident, and so intelligent. I didn’t want to lose her—the only real friend I had at school—so whenever her parents asked me a question, I would answer using the largest words in my vocabulary. I was invited back the following weekend. We were best friends from that moment on.

“Maybe this was a mistake?” I asked.

The tattoo artist looked up at Emma, pulled the gun away from her finger and turned it off. “Check ‘em out. If they’re good, I’ll wrap ‘em both.”

Emma held her hand up to mine. In the middle of each of our pinky fingers, between the two bending lines, was the inked outline of a pink heart. They were our graduation presents to each other. Permanent marks that matched like blood.

“Charlie, you’re my sister, forever, and this shows how much I love you. So tell me, how could it be a mistake?” She waited several moments, and then her eyes moved to the tattoo artist. “They’re perfect. Wrap them, please.”

A knot formed in the back of my throat and tears threatened to spill from my eyes. Emma’s comments often made that happen, and I was usually left with an open mouth and no words. I didn’t need to say anything. She knew. She always knew.

***

Lilly shouted my name just as my cell phone began to ring. Both noises brought me back to the present. I forced my eyes open, realizing I was still huddled in the center of my bed, my arms wrapped around my legs. I lifted my fingers, and my eyes found the little pink heart. It reminded me that I was no longer eighteen; I was twenty-three, sleeping in the same room I’d been in back then, still living with Lilly and taking care of her like I had as a child. Although the ink on my hand had been there for more than five years, the memory didn’t feel that age. It was still fresh…
too
fresh. I shook my head, trying to shove my thoughts of Emma to the back of my mind, out of easy reach, where those thoughts needed to stay.

I ignored Lilly’s yelling. She could wait, but the phone call couldn’t. Three people had my number; I had spoken to my boss this morning, and Lilly was in the next room.

There was only one other. 

“Are you doing all right?” Dallas asked when I picked up.

Whenever I returned from an Emma memory, I was filled with ice. But Dallas’s voice brought me warmth, a fire that spread to each of my limbs. I ignored Lilly’s second shout and moved toward the pillows, leaning my back against the wall, hoping the steadiness would stop my quivering. It didn’t.

“I’m fine.”

Dallas knew that yesterday was the anniversary of my accident. We’d been hooking up for over a year and he saw it every time he looked at my hand as I’d gotten the date of the crash tattooed above the heart. He also knew I didn’t have anyone else in my life who would call.

“You don’t have to lie,” he said. “I know you’re not fine. I was going to call yesterday, but I figured you needed a minute…that you’d probably be hurting more today.”

Though my leg had fully healed from the break, I still got random tweaks, and it stiffened up on cold days. That wasn’t the pain he was referring to, though; during the few times I’d had a little too much to drink around him, I’d purged more than just alcohol. He knew the emotions that had taken up residence in my stomach, and how, even five years later, they hadn’t lessened a bit.

“I need you,” Lilly yelled. “You’d better not leave without coming in here first.”

My alarm clock showed that I had less than an hour before I had to be at work. I got up from the bed and took a seat on the floor in front of the mirror. “Thanks for calling.”

His breathing filled the silence. Then he cleared his throat. “I don’t know what to say.”

I swiped bronzer across my cheeks. “There’s nothing you
can
say.”

“I mean about us.”

“There isn’t anything to say about that, either.”

“I miss you, Cee.”

The way he said my name…it was as though he were whispering it into my ear. I felt the heat that came from his mouth, the chill that ran through me from his touch. His hands and fingers—I missed it all. A throbbing started in my lower stomach.

Dallas used his whole body to tease me; he knew just how to push me toward a peak, and how to let me come down. If he would have asked me to come over, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself. But then, after falling flat on his pillow, we’d be right back in that place—the talking and pleading, him asking me to move in, to unzip and show him every speck of black glitter that didn’t fall from just my paintings. It all threatened the barrier that I had formed around my heart. And it wasn’t that I didn’t
want
to give him that; it was more that I
couldn’t
. So I gave him what I could. But sex wasn’t enough for him.

“I…I have to go,” I said quickly. I hung up before he could say any more.

My mind moved back to the times we’d fucked in the bathroom at the train station, in the alley behind our favorite restaurant, on the grass behind his apartment. The toys he had used on me…how he’d carried around a pair of my dirty panties and kept my smell on his scruff when he went to work so he could taste me all day, because a finger or two would never have been enough for him.

My hands began to move, buttoning the waist of my pants and locking my belt into place. I placed my bag diagonally across my body and pulled a light jacket over it. My cell phone went in my back pocket, and I shut off the light. There would be others, I reminded myself, who wouldn’t ask me to open up. Others I wouldn’t give the chance to ask.

“Charlie! Now!” Lilly called.

I walked into her room, noticing how greasy her hair was, how the sides had stuck to her cheeks. Her lips were flaky and cracked, her tongue so dry it had gone white with thick spit. Her fingers gripped the blanket like she was trying desperately to hold on. In a way, she was. But every morning when I delivered her pills, I watched her become more submissive to her disease. With every day that passed, her hygiene and appearance mattered a little less. In the past, I tried to wipe away the grime on her face, and the filth that had accumulated on her body. It only angered her, so I stopped.

Ovarian cancer. That was the diagnosis the doctor had given her four years ago when she went to his office to get the results of her screening. Before the exam, she hadn’t had a checkup in years and only made the appointment because something didn’t feel right. She hadn’t expected it to be cancer, or for the last two rounds of chemo to have no effect or for it to metastasize to her pelvic and leg bones. The pain medication kept her stable, but she no longer had the use of her legs and found it difficult to move in and out of her wheelchair.

Lilly had always looked like an older version of me, with her long chocolate hair and full lips. But my eyes were green, while hers were caramel. Despite all the liquor she drank, her skin had been creamy, an olive and gold complexion. And whenever someone heard her sing, they would ask why she was unsigned—or at least the drunks at the bar would, when she’d stand up on a speaker and belt out some old school metal jam. She was beautiful and she had the voice, but she would answer, “I can’t raise a kid on the road. Charlie ain’t got no one but me.”

I wasn’t the reason Lilly didn’t have a record deal; it was her fear that had kept it from happening. Boston was where she’d grown up, where she knew enough people to keep her employed and to help raise me, and where she wasn’t judged for being an alcoholic. But claiming to stay for me made her look noble—or at least like a good mom—so she preferred that story over the truth.

But now her beauty was gone. The wilted flower stared up from her bed with red, watery lids. Her tongue swiped over her lips. She reached underneath the damp washcloth, scratching at the patches of baldness on her head. If I were to paint her, wisps of white would have filled the page.

“Can you get me some water?” She lit a cigarette and dangled it between her fingers. She coughed as she exhaled, barely having the strength to take a second drag, but she refused to quit.

I handed her the cup from the side table and bent the straw so it would reach her mouth.

“You get the mail?” she asked.

I nodded. Not having enough energy to use her wheelchair, she wasn’t able to make it downstairs to the mailbox. I was thankful for that.

“Anything from the landlord?”

“I should have enough to cover the whole bill, plus what we owe from last month.”

“Can’t you work overtime so this shit won’t happen again?”

“Like I told you this morning, I was only approved for thirty-six hours.”